In a storage area network (SAN), a SAN management application monitors and manages manageable entities in the SAN. The manageable entities include storage arrays, connectivity devices, hosts and other resources. Typically, software components known as agents execute on the hosts for gathering, reporting, and monitoring the manageable entities in the SAN. The manageable entities are responsive to the agents for reporting various status metrics back to the agents and receiving control information from the agents. A management server executes the SAN management application, and oversees the agents. The management server is responsive to a console having a graphical user interface (GUI) for receiving and displaying operator parameters with a SAN operator.
The agents periodically collect and transmit management information (collected from resources that those agents manage) to the management application. The management information pertains to the manageable entities that the agent is monitoring, and is employed to update and maintain a managed object database (MODB). The managed object database stores collective information on the manageable entities across the SAN for responding to queries from the management application. Such queries include available storage, used storage, configured and in-use devices, and frequency of usage, for example, and is employed to generate reports on trending analysis, current utilization, usage projections, and other reporting, accounting and maintenance operations.
A conventional SAN management application can also invoke other sub-applications for performing various SAN operations, such as gathering and reporting statistical data in the SAN. The sub-applications are organized as products having features for providing the particular gathering, reporting or control functionality. SAN data gathering, processing, and reporting ranges from broadly characterized to highly detailed, depending on features desired by each particular SAN site (user organization). Typical features include gathering statistics about storage array performance, such as storage capacity used, allocated, available and free within file systems. The agents employ a set of data collection policies to identify the type and frequency of performance data to be gathered. As noted above, this gathered data is stored in a managed object database (MODB) for subsequent usage and querying by the management application. Each of the sub-applications, therefore, is able to provide features by accessing certain types and amounts of data when the storage area network management application establishes and invokes an agent with a particular data collection policy (DCP). As a specific example, a data collection policy assigned to an agent that causes that agent to collect details of file systems on a host can allow the file system data collected by that agent to support a feature purchased by a customer known as “file level reporting” (FLR) that enables a customer to see intricate details of file systems configured within hosts in the storage area network.